Loew, who grew up in Chicago, and Genna, of New York, are bringing the “powerhouse” styles of pizza to Seattle, Genna said. The restaurant will pay homage to the heritage of those styles and nod to the Red Robin with its brick aesthetic and mural.

“We understand how iconic that place is for Seattle,” Genna said.

The two have ties to the neighborhood. They owned a boat moored near the Red Robin and frequented the restaurant in the late ’90s when they both worked at Microsoft.

The restaurant will employ about 25 to 35 people, and the owners hope to open it sometime in July.

The Robin’s Nest site is a complex of two buildings separated by an L-shape courtyard. The pizzeria will be in the left building street level. The rest of the complex will be 61-63 apartment units with approximately 20 parking spaces. Photo taken July 2, 2019.

There are many gems on Lake Union, but one that mostly locals know about (and fiercely protect) is about to disappear. It’s the floating sidewalk adjacent to the Fairview bridge that is itself adjacent to the historic City Light Steam Plant building. The old wooden trestle bridge has done its time and must go and along with it the hidden floating sidewalk – you can’t see it from the roadway.

But it’s there all the same, down a stairway, offering a
brief, delightful refuge from the street. It’s also one of the few places where
you can get close to the lake and view a wide vista, as a friend of mine noted.
Close, for sure, you’re walking right on it; it’s open space, a de facto park.

Pedestrians love the floating sidewalk beside the Fairview trestle.

The bridge will be replaced with something earthquake proof,
streetcar ready, sturdy and modern with bike lanes and look out points. At
first there were only vague promises of bringing back the floating
sidewalk. It was dependent on budget and
permitting, said the city, and that didn’t sound promising. But MariLyn Yim,
SDOT project manager, confirms the floating sidewalk will be rebuilt.

Rendering of new Fairview Avenue Bridge.

She had to do “some trading and swapping and talking [to
get] the floating walkway OK’d,” wrote Jules James, one of its fierce defenders,
in an email.

Closure and demolition of the bridge is expected to happen
this fall, once improvements to Aloha Street are complete as that will be the
detour route.

The roadway next to the historic Steam Plant building is actually an old wooden trestle, reinforced over the years.

Catch the old floating sidewalk now while you still can. It’s just a stone’s throw from MOHAI and the Center for Wooden Boats. Walk up Eastlake Ave. for a close-up view of the historic Steam Plant and its remarkable tilework. (Eastlake Ave. is its front.) Next door is the even older Hydro House, open for breakfast and lunch weekdays with an outdoor patio that faces the lake and overlooks the old bridge.

Featured floating sidewalk sketch by Karen Berry.

Owners of the Cortina, located at the opposite southern corner from Serafina, at 2001 Eastlake Ave., have submitted plans to the city to tear down the two buildings that make up the 1957 22-unit apartment complex, according to a May 21 Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce article. The proposal for the site takes advantage of the new 65-foot up zoning, notes the Journal. The owners, Graham Capital Group, plan a six-story, 90-unit apartment building with retail and commercial space and 35 underground parking space, as well as room for 95 bike stalls.

This old house on Eastlake may be replaced with a six-story 30-unit building, no parking.

Another parcel taking advantage of the new up zone, is between the Cortina and Serafina, an old house, at 2031 Eastlake Ave. Plans were submitted for it to be replaced, according to a May 20 Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce article, with “a six-story building with 30 units, no parking and possibly 600 square feet of commercial space.”

According to the Daily
Journal of Commerce, the 1968 Roanoke Terrace Apartments at the corner of
Eastlake Ave. (2600) and Roanoke St., across from the tennis courts, recently
changed hands for just under $6.8 million.

Don’t worry; it’s not a tear down, but the new owners, Shilshole Development, do plan to renovate the four story, 16-unit structure. The average unit is 970 square feet; and the average price per unit pencils out at $424,475.

There are 14 parking spaces.

“Also in the same neighborhood,” notes the Journal, “Shilshole Development is redeveloping the old Ross Labs site, at 3138 Fairview Ave. E., with a small renovated office building and 103 new apartments”

Roanoke Terrace Apartments seen from the tennis court side of the street, and way above seen from Eastlake.The old Ross Labs.What the new building at 3138 Fairview Ave. E. might look like (just below and to the north of Lake Union Cafe).

A centerpiece development for Eastlake is receiving a lot of excitement and pushback from the community. It will replace two buildings at corner of Louisa St. and Eastlake Ave., the strip mall that houses the Mammoth bistro and the retro SPRAG office structure next door. There’s excitement for the new potential landmark design that the architect Hewitt is known for delivering and for street level activity with the retail and housing that will come. The pushback comes at how tall the new construction will be, possibly six stories and the largest in Eastlake, blocking views from Rogers Playfield and the Green Street, and how affordable the housing will be.

The developers are open to public feedback. A February 28 open house introduced developers, Washington Holdings + Pollard and architect to the community with photos of past work. A preliminary concept was also on view with a timeline. Demolition is expected next summer, 2020, with a new building opening Summer 2022.

There’s another community outreach meeting on Friday, March 8, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the SPRAG building at 2517 Eastlake Ave.

More opportunities for public feedback are expected.

preliminary site plan

Hewitt designs

Bottom image is the new multi-family on Stoneway.

Eastlake project, home to Grand Central Bakery.

sketch by Karen Berry

According to today’s Daily Journal of Commerce, Hamlin Place apartments at the corner of Hamlin and Franklin (2800 Franklin Ave.) sold recently for just under $2.2 million. The corner lot is roughly the size of three or four residential lots in Eastlake, and with residential lots topping out at $1.5 million, the Hamlin sale appears to be a steal. Actually, it’s likely an internal business deal, as the DJC writes,

The seller was DK Hamlin Place LLC, which acquired the property in 1995 for $905,000.

The buyer was RL Hamlin Place LLC, which is associated with a private investor on Mercer Island.

Brokers were not announced. The buyer and the seller, who share the same surname, were partners in the 1995 investment. The deal was worth about $134,781 per unit.

The DJC goes on to note the building was constructed at the same time as I-5, 1959.

The four-story building has 16 units and an equal number of surface parking spaces.

With that much surface parking and an up zone increase that will allow the property to grow 10 feet taller and slightly wider, it’s ripe for possible re-development, but plans at this point are unknown.

Front view of 2800 Franklin Ave.

Side view

16-space rear parking lot

A Portland art, activism, and resistance project has found its way to Lake Union shores. Bronze children’s shoes have shown up on the fence in front of TOPS Seward School near the Louisa Street bus stop and on a tree along the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop at Roanoke Street. A note attached to both sets reads, “These bronze shoes represent the children separated by I.C.E. They serve as a reminder to all of us, and their families, that they are precious, and we will not forget them.”

They’re part of a movement started by artist Aimee Sitarz who wanted to channel her outrage at the Trump administration policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the US-Mexican border. She began bronzing children’s shoes and hanging them around Portland, not without some controversy. The project has also been featured in a couple of Portland galleries. Photographer K. Kendall writes about Sitarz’s work:

I’ve spoken before of Aimee Sitarz and her bronze shoes–evoking both the bronzed baby shoes popular with middle-class families in the 1950s and the horrible scenes of abandoned shoes near the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The two ideas come together in Aimee’s imagination because she wants us to remember the children incarcerated by the Trump administration immigration policies. So she keeps on making “bronze” shoes and hanging them in public places, to remind people.

Now others are taking up the cause, requesting bronze shoes from the artist and hanging them around their city.

Bronze children’s shoes hanging from a tree at Roanoke Street and Fairview Avenue.

Update: As of yesterday the shoes at Roanoke Street were missing.

It wasn’t supposed to be Gas Works Park. It was supposed to be Myrtle Edwards Park, named for a former city councilwoman, who served from 1955 to 1969 and who was a big supporter of turning industrial wastelands into parks. But Edwards’ heirs were appalled when Richard Haag, the city’s chosen designer for the park proposed in the early 1970s preserving the old Gas Works structure that was on the site. It was unheard of at the time. The expectation was that the old coal plant would be torn down.

Haag passed away May 9 at the age of 94 of natural causes. His family said he didn’t want an obituary, so the news is just now getting out.

He had an illustrious career, moving to Seattle in the late 1950s to work at the architecture department at the UW and then founding the school’s landscape architecture program. He was instrumental in transforming the Seattle Center from fairgrounds to park grounds. He designed Steinbrueck Park with its namesake, Victor Steinbrueck. He also designed the wonderland of Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. His firm, Richard Haag Associates, Inc., completed over 500 projects over the course of nearly 60 years.

Even before he got the north Lake Union park assignment, Haag had been enchanted with the Gas Works structure. In a phone interview, after a presentation to the Eastlake Community Council, he said, he’d come across the shuttered plant when he first moved to Seattle. That place is magic, he thought, I want to work with that site.

In another interview in 2014, about a year after the park was included on the National Register of Historic Places, Haag said, “I had no rock outcroppings and no sacred trees. Not much there except these wonderful iron totemic structures. The more I was around there, the more I bonded with those things. And I thought, ‘Yup, I’ve got to save them.”

And save them he did. He had an artist paint a rendering of what the park could look like and displayed it at a public meeting of over 700 people. Public opinion moved in his favor. The Edwards family withdrew their name for the park.

But it all worked out in the end. After all the controversy, Myrtle Edwards eventually got her park, a lovely one on Elliot Bay. And Gas Works Park couldn’t be named anything else.

Too High, Too Steep author, David B. Williams, will narrate a one-hour cruise on Lake Union aboard the Virginia V steamship, the last of its kind, built almost 100 years ago of old growth timbers and used as part of the Mosquito Fleet. “I will be discussing some history on the lake, the ship canal/locks, and the Mosquito Fleet,” he notes on his website.

There are four more excursions this summer, two each “Steamship Saturday,” July 28 and Aug 25. Kick back enjoy a glass of beer or wine (they’ll be available for sale along with sodas and snacks onboard), drink in the views as well, and partake in some colorful local history.

The tour is a collaboration between the Center for Wooden Boats and the Virginia V Foundation.

“There’s a cost but it’s worth it because the boat is so lovely,” adds Williams.

Unless you’ve been lost in another dimension these last couple of weeks, you’ve probably heard about Liminal Seattle that website started by two cartographers, Jeremy Puma and Garret Kelly, mapping all the strange and wonderful places in Seattle. The story about their website made the front page of the Seattle Times this week and had been bubbling up all over the local press before then. The Associated Press also picked it up.

Liminal Seattle is tracking the hot spots around the Salish Sea where people have had paranormal or inexplicable experiences. The site encourages submissions. The map makers are looking for true stories although they’re not opposed to a little mythologizing along the way.

Puma and Garret are becoming curators for that Other Seattle the imaginative and fantastical. Future plans include publishing a Tolkienesque map of the area. It’s all for fun with maybe a little social commentary on the side.

One of the first places to get mapped out was Hellmouth curiously overlapping South Lake Union.

When asked during an interview with the Seattle Review of Books how they determined the boundaries, Kelly replied, “I get the impression that you are questioning our cartographic skills? Is there an underlying assumption that we’re somehow “making up” the boundaries of the Hellmouth? Look man, I didn’t create the Hellmouth, I just pulled out the protractor and used my skills as a map-maker to roughly define the border. ”

Ah, but what is a Hellmouth you may be wondering, unless you’re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, then you already know.

Hellmouths are places of increased supernatural energy. According to the mythology of the “Buffyverse“, this is the area in which the barriers between dimensions are weak. The Hellmouth has a focal point, which serves as a portal between earth and Hell. For these reasons, the Hellmouth attracts demons and other supernatural creatures, becoming a “hot spot” for supernatural activity. (Wikipedia)

Long before Hellmouths were brought to light by “Buffyverse,” the underlying universal story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they were featured throughout Medieval art and theater usually as the mouths of fire-breathing dragons devouring the damned.

A UW Theater dissertation on the web describes Hellmouths “as the conventional setting for three popular cyclic episodes of the middle ages, the Fall of Lucifer, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Last Judgment.” It was “often celebrated for its spectacle—flames, pyrotechnics display, smoke, and tumult….”

Wait a second doesn’t our own Hellmouth have a great, big spectacle every year, every 4th of July to be exact?